COMPARISON OF AMBULATORY AND CLINICAL BLOOD PRESSURES, AND THEIR CORRELATION WITH ORGANIC HEART DAMAGE, IN THE ELDERLY

Casual blood pressure (BP) measurements may sometimes indicate the pre sence of cardiovascular morbidity and mortality, but the correlations between BP values and the subsequent occurrence of such complications are low. This may depend on the known inability of casual BP measureme nts to reflect accurately the 24-hour mean and overall profile of the BP. In this study. electrocardiography (EGG) of left ventricular muscl e mass was related to various measures of BP during circadian ambulato ry BP monitoring in 156 hypertensive and non-hypertensive elderly pati ents. Multiple regression analysis performed to establish the presence of left ventricular hypertophy (LVH) revealed that the product of amb ulatory systolic BP x diastolic BP (p = 0.027) and ambulatory diastoli c BP were significant variables. Clinical pressure variables were not significant. Multiple linear regression analysis to establish the degr ee of LVH in function of the pressure variables generated a model wher e the variables included are the product of ambulatory systolic BP x d iastolic BP (p = 2.7 x 10(-8)), ambulatory systolic BP (p = 7.8 x 10(- 6)) and ambulatory diastolic BP (p = 2.4 x 10(-6)). Results obtained a gree with the literature and revealed that LVH evaluated using ECG-Rom hilt-Estes score was correlated in terms of presence/absence of organ damage and in terms of score to ambulatory monitoring values.